Add Summer Foundational Content. Includes summer original research or a summer refresh where appropriate.

Targeted Summer Customer Information or FAQ Needs. Depending on your business include information such as recipes, home care, family vacations, sports and beach time.

Include Summer Information In Your Cyclical Content. This is particularly good for local summer activities that exist within your community or product category. For example, New York City hosts Fleet Week and Fourth of July fireworks.

Give Summer Crowd Pleaser Content A Fun Theme. Take advantage of summer activities like movies, music and beaches.

Key Summer Content Marketing Question To Ask: How does this content fit with my company’s needs, brand, formats and language?

Summer Content Marketing Tips:

Check last year’s editorial and social media calendars including content marketing metrics. This provides insights into what worked and what didn’t. While you’re doing this, assess your headlines, media format and presentation.

Decide which content needs to be spruced up for summer. Use a spreadsheet or other program for tracking.

Highlight where you have gaps in your summer content. When you examine your content as a whole, it’s easier to determine where you’re missing elements and what they are. Add them to your content creation list.

Cover major holidays and events related to your business, brand and offering.

Add summer themes to your cyclical content. This includes recurring content columns. The objective is to show that you’re in touch with your audience and what’s happening.

Get input from employees and customers. Don’t go it alone. Find out what interests others in your business and products during the summer.

3. Select summer content marketing elements: Think visual

Focus on the look and feel of your content marketing to make it look fresh and attract attention. This is particularly important for visual content especially to make your content marketing more social sharing friendly.

Pick a few visual symbols related to your brand and content to make it feel of the moment. Where possible give your brand colors a summer brightness.

One easy way to accomplish this is to tap into Pantone’s seasonal colors. (BTW—Michael Brenner also recommends doing this!)

Remember: Even evergreen content can benefit from a makeover. In turn, this gives each piece of content another round of engagement.

Summer Content Marketing Tips:

Determine a few key visual themes and integrate them into your content. Create a few summer templates to spiff up existing content to minimize work and costs. Be like Peg Fitzpatrick and batch your content summerization to save time.

Make summer visuals easy-to-implement. The more you streamline the process, the easier it is to change.

Keep track of the content you spruce up for summer. While tracking may seem time consuming, it’ll give you a change list for other seasons!

Before blasting out your summer content marketing, assess which segments of your audience need and want this content most.

Since summer is playtime make sure to engage with sales and customer service to maximize your content reach and use. This reduces extra or duplicate content efforts and increases content marketing effectiveness cost effectively.